Developing 3D graphics is similar to creating real-time art. Even more impressive are the detailed and interactive 3D graphics found in modern real-time computer games. It is impressive when you compare it against computer graphics of ten years ago. Console and PC games were limited to a fixed set of hardware features, and resolutions were quite low and far from today’s high resolution, multisampled, antialiased, and almost realistic images.
With all of the new fancy hardware-dependent graphical improvements of the past decade also came an increase in complexity when creating graphics for games. Developers deal with many complexities, even when drawing simple graphics on the screen.
XNA Game Studio has attempted to limit these complexities in some cases and in others to solve them all together. As discussed in previous topics, the capability to have a basic graphics window display a clear color is trivial and requires only that you create a new project for one of the supported platforms.To get to that point, using C++ with DirectX or OpenGL can take hundreds of lines of code.The graphics APIs exposed by XNA Game Studio are easy to use and often lead to the developer to fall into the correct solution using them.
Note
If you have used XNA Game Studio before, you will notice a number of API differences in XNA Game Studio 4.0. A tremendous amount of work and energy went into updating the graphics
APIs to be even easier to use and to support the new Windows Phone 7 platform.
In this topic, we cover the basics developers should know before diving into creating 3D graphics.We start with defining 3D graphics and their makeup.Then, we focus on some basic math that is required when working on 3D graphics. Next, we cover the different stages that are part of the graphics pipeline.We finish by covering the XNA Game Studio GraphicsAdapter and GraphicsDevice classes and drawing the first 3D primitives on the screen.
